


Y Ddraig Goch

by doomcanary



Series: Cadwaladr [1]
Category: Merlin (TV)
Genre: Angst, Dark, Mildly Dubious Consent, Torture, Unrequited Love
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-03-19
Updated: 2014-03-19
Packaged: 2018-01-16 08:17:10
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,482
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1338469
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/doomcanary/pseuds/doomcanary
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff"><p>I must be having a crap week again, I'm writing kink. Cadwaladr is a historic Welsh king who was a kind of pre-mythological Arthur, and did some pretty impressive things in terms of kicking the Saxons out but was ultimately beaten back; I'm messing with him for plot reasons. Casterley Camp is an iron age hill fort in Wiltshire, and yes yes hill forts most likely weren't really forts, but I like prehistoric things. Alun is a weasel and I have no idea where characters like him come from in my head, I really don't.</p></blockquote>





	Y Ddraig Goch

Deep below a castle in Cornwall, Arthur Pendragon is imprisoned, stirring in his chains. The dungeon is dank and chill, ancient black stones green with moisture; the air on Arthur's bare chest is like cold, dead fingers, tightening his skin and chilling his muscles. He does not permit himself to slouch, to let the chains that hold his arms outstretched take his weight. In the dim shaft of daylight that falls into this place, he knows that he must shine like some rich treasure, forgotten in the bowels of the earth; that his fine, glossy hair draws the light, and turns silver in the dimness where it is gold in day.

“The young Pendragon.” The voice is sonorous, masculine, mature; its tone rich with mocking contempt. It echoes around the naked rock, raising the hairs on Arthur's neck. Cadwaladr king, the Wolf of Powys. His ravenous armies, their trail of bloody destruction paused for a time here among the mists of Cornwall, surround the brooding rock within which Arthur hangs chained. They are a sea of wolf-packs beneath a bloody standard, a pacing beast; and this their commander, a beast that stands mocking at his back. A kind of thrill prickles in Arthur's spine. He raises his head, looking at green-slicked stone.

Cadwaladr moves, his steps easy and powerful. The man who comes into Arthur's view is a predator, a grey-muzzled wolf indeed; his eyes are piercing under heavy brows, his body powerful, his height more than a match for Arthur's. Arthur feels his heartbeat pick up pace; this is a dangerous man, a seasoned warrior. He, prince of Albion, hangs in the balance of this day. He is a coin in Cadwaladr's hand. Cadwaladr's eyes never leave his, and yet Arthur knows Cadwaladr has seen the tremor in his arms, the jump of the pulse in his throat.

“Your attack was bold and ill-considered, boy,” he says. “To leave your flank open is the mistake of an unseasoned youth.”

Arthur smiles, a thin curl of one corner of his mouth.

“I never had any intention but to allow myself to be captured.”

Cadwaladr smiles slowly; there is not a flicker of surprise in his eyes. Arthur's heart beats faster yet.

“How else would the king of Albion draw the attention of the Wolf,” Cadwaladr counters. “And what is Uther Pendragon's message to me, so vital that it must be carried by a callow youth?”

“The message I bear comes not from my father,” says Arthur. “It comes from me.”

At that, Cadwaladr's gaze intensifies. “Speak,” he commands.

“We fight the same front, lord of Powys. The Saxons are a scourge upon every land. It is foolishness for Albion and Powys to be against one another.”

“And so you seek to yoke your throne to mine.”

Anger flares in Arthur. He draws himself up.

“No, my lord Cadwaladr,” he replies. “I offer you alliance."

Cadwaladr's stony face twists, and he begins to laugh.

“You? You offer me alliance? And what of your father's will, boy?”

“My will is my own,” says Arthur. “I must look beyond my father's years, to the future of Albion. And should you not do the same, lord Cadwaladr? You are lord of a kingdom with no heirs.”

Without warning, Cadwaladr strikes him; a full-fisted blow that snaps his head back and brings the salt-and-iron taste of blood into his mouth. He shakes his head, blinking away a swirl of dizziness.

“Uther Pendragon's child,” says Cadwaladr, bitter contempt in his words. “This is the future you offer me. Do you know nothing, boy? Does the Pendragon's madness silence even bards?”

Shock bites Arthur, but he rallies himself. “I am the future of Albion,” he says, feeling the sting of a split lip as he shapes the words. “Lays and history are of no concern to me. What I offer is of use to you.”

“I will accept no alliance, boy,” says the Wolf of Powys. “I will accept only Camelot's submission.”

“Then we are at an impasse, my lord.”

Cadwaladr leaves the dungeon, and Arthur wraps grim fingers around his chains as the heavy silence of the earth descends once more.

 

 

The light above is fading when Cadwaladr returns, bearing a torch he sets in an iron holder high on the wall. He tosses aside a chicken bone; bold in the shadows, a rat sneaks out of some hidden crack and drags it away to gnaw.

“Your father's armies are busy far away in the east, boy,” he says, in that voice as dark and rough as tree-bark. “There will be no rescue. You have no choice, prince of Albion, but to accept my will. Do you submit?”

Arthur already knows what Cadwaladr is telling him; what the Wolf does not know is that Camelot is fighting a losing battle, that Uther in his rage has taken on odds far outside his army's might. Arthur is no seasoned veteran, no grey-pelted wolf, but it is painfully clear that Uther will be besieged at Casterley Camp, and without assistance he will be held there until he surrenders or the last knight dies.

“I serve no kingdom but my own,” he says quietly.

Cadwaladr is close, far too close, to Arthur; his piercing eyes, the scent of leather and old blood, battle and sweat. Arthur's blood races, adrenalin of the battlefield and a sharp twist of something like fear.

Cadwaladr nods quietly, and Arthur feels a cold understanding that he will be left here until his will is broken. Cadwaladr leaves him in the gathering dark; after a while, his head nods, but as he sinks limply agains this chains his weight puts a searing pain into his arms. He begins to burn, and focuses his whole being on his breathing, fighting down sleep.

 

 

“My army surrounds us, Albion,” says Cadwaladr, low and easy. Arthur is not sure if he's dreaming or if Cadwaladr's really there. “With a single word, I can bring all the might of the Wolf to bear on your father's borders. I can save your father, motherless child.”

Shock strikes through Arthur like a bolt of lightning. He starts awake; the cell is empty, Cadwaladr nowhere. Uneasy, he breathes, in-out, in-out, waiting; dozes, falls against his chains, hauls himself up. Pain recedes to a dull, maddening burn under the glittering edge of exhaustion; they are the two greater rocks between which Arthur hangs chained. He thinks his vision is greying, until he sees dawn on a rat's back and realises it's day.

Until noon and a splash of yellow sunlight, fleeting in the cavernous air, he counts the straws and dead leaves littering the floor; between then and night he maps the cracks in the rock face and wages battles across them in his mind, and composes poems to the beauty of the rat. Cadwaladr comes at nightfall, and asks him again if he submits.

“I cannot,” says Arthur. “I serve only Albion.”

 

 

Time eludes him; it is day, but which day he is unsure. He cannot sleep as he is, bound upright; as he crumples the pain of his weight falling on his arms jerks him back to wakefulness. The hours – days? - have stretched into an unmeasurable haze of exhaustion and half-sleep. Cadwaladr's words weave and echo through that sleep like an ominous dream. “If you would hunt with the beast, you must accept the beast's mastery. All you have to do is swear an oath to me, boy.”

Dimly, from wherever in his mind it is that he's sunk to, Arthur hears a clattering, the sound of armour or feet... the world sways and twists, and he feels a wet chill against his back. He thinks perhaps he has fallen to the floor. As the rocks begin to move around him, as he's sliding away, out of the cell, he can only wonder if this is what death will feel like, a slow slipping out of himself. He is spiralling down into sleep even before his captors have set him down again. He dreams, and the wolf-lord is a black presence in his mind, offering such simple gifts, and asking only obedience.

_I can save your father, boy. Did you ever know his queen?_

 

 

Arthur is shaken roughly awake in a tent, the sour smell of long-crushed grass and the half-muffled hubbub of a battle camp all around him. He starts up in alarm, only to lose his balance and fall back onto his side; his hands are bound behind his back. His shoulders ache with a deep, bonesore pain that will be with him days.

“Ah, good,” says a dry, parchmenty voice; brittle and crackling. “Tell me, boy, what do you know about your father's plans for the lands east of Albion?”

The speaker is as dry and brittle as his voice; something like what Gaius might have been, if he'd been pressed in a book in his youth and never taken out.

“Who the hell are you?” demands Arthur.

“I am King Cadwaladr's chief advisor, and you would do well to answer my questions,” says the man, and there's steel under the papery dryness of that tone. He motions to someone out of Arthur's view, and hands haul him onto his knees.

“Now. What do you know about your father's plans for the lands east of Albion?”

 

 

“For pity's sake, man, I can't tell you what I don't know,” repeats Arthur wearily. He must have slept a few hours at least; he's still exhausted, but his vision is clearer and the will-sapping haze has almost completely gone. “My father is increasingly secretive and not even I am privy to his battle plans until I am given his orders to carry out.”

The steward – Alun is apparently his name, although Arthur's right cheek bears a throbbing testament to the ill wisdom of using it – folds his hands. “You would have me believe,” he says, “that the crown prince of Albion has no spies, no lockpicks to creep into the king's chambers and find out his plans in advance?”

“I trust my father in few things,” says Arthur through gritted teeth, “but in battle and in his loyalty to my mother he has never misstepped.”

Alun's pallid eyes sharpen a little. “Loyalty indeed, given the portents that surrounded your birth, Arthur Pendragon.”

For a brief moment Arthur is thrown; then the steward's motives become clear.

“Nonsense,” he says, drawing himself up. “My loyalty is to Albion, and I will not be fooled by petty rumour-mongering. In Albion, bards who tell such scurrilous tales are hounded out.”

Alun watches him for a long, silent moment, then curls his lip and turns away to his desk, his sharp-pointed quill as ready to scratch lines onto the sheet before him as a knife to cut skin.

“You are a foolish boy, and you will be a weak king,” he says. “Take him away.”

 

 

 

Arthur is dragged from his green and dripping prison a second time that day, woken from a fitful sleep by the scurrying departure of the rat, heralding the tramp of feet. But this time he's taken not out of the castle, down to where Cadwaladr's army camp seethes like an anthill with men; he is hauled up, up long stone stairs into tapestried halls, some scorched with fire or hanging slashed by sword-cuts. This is Castle Dore, the seat of Mark of Cornwall; Arthur dimly remembers visiting it as a boy, a summer of gulls and moorland. He feels a deep sadness at the knowledge that Mark fell to Cadwaladr's hungry swords.

He is thrown to his knees in a richly furnished room; the King's own chamber, if he doesn't miss his guess. From the hooks above the fireplace, behind the hastily slung banner of a wolf, loose shreds of Cornwall's blue insignia still hang. The wolf stares down, white on its emerald ground, as if in victory.

At the tall window stands Cadwaladr, a goblet in his hand. Beside the fire a bath steams.

“Prince Arthur,” the warlord greets him. “I would speak with you. But first, perhaps you would like to wash, and rest yourself.”

Cadwaladr sets down the goblet and walks out of the room, leaving only two impassive guardsmen who bracket the door. For a long moment Arthur gazes after Cadwaladr, trying through his bone-deep tiredness to fathom out this new turn of events. Is he to be treated as a royal hostage, combed and pampered like a lady's feist and presented as a bargaining chip?

But there can be no answering that question now; he has no choice but to await Cadwaladr's whim. The bath is cooling, and Arthur strips off his clothes with barely a second glance for the guards, and avails himself of the welcome warmth. He barely hauls himself out before he falls asleep again, and his skin is still damp as he crawls into the ornate bed in a side chamber, and sinks into slumber.

He's woken for the second time that day by a rough hand shaking him.

“Rise and shine, Your Highness,” says one of the guards, a heavy, sarcastic emphasis clear on his title. “Lord Cadwaladr wants you.”

Arthur nods, and the guard watches him disinterestedly as he dresses. His clothes have been, if not cleaned, at least brushed free of mud and dead leaves. The guards escort him to the great hall, and there he finds Cadwaladr, seated beside the fire. At his feet sits a bard, adjusting the strings of an Irish harp.

“Sit, your highness,” says Cadwaladr. A page-boy offers him a goblet identical to the one Cadwaladr holds; it is silver, heavy with sapphires. Cornwall's, of course.

“I assume you have some purpose in mind,”says Arthur.

“Simply a story I gather you do not know,” said Cadwaladr. “Please, listen.”

In a pleasant, mellow voice, Cadwaladr's bard begins to recite a lay in the old style, all rhythms and counterpoints and assonant sounds; it's beautifully written, drawing the ear and the heart, and Arthur begins to be drawn in. He sinks on the waves of the bard's sweet tone into the story of a young king, foolish in love, who makes a terrible bargain with a fey and loses his queen.

“ _Then fell the fairy furiously  
Upon Pendragon's brow -_ ”

Arthur bolts to his feet. “This is slander!” he roars.

“Sit down,” says Cadwaladr, his voice iron, motionless in his seat.

“Impossible,” says Arthur. “This is propaganda. I refuse to hear it.”

“I am Gwynn ap Rhys, your highness, King Mark's bard. Not the Wolf Lord's.” There's a flash of rebellion in the bard's eyes; and Arthur can believe it. A bard's life is sacred, especially to the Welsh – if Cadwaladr had Gwynn killed, his own men would turn on him.

“Indeed, Gwynn,” says Cadwaladr to the bard. “But perhaps you could tell Prince Arthur where you learnt this lay.”

“From a Roman's son, my lord,” says Gwynn. “He was travelling to visit his brother at Glastonbury.”

“And what was his brother's name?”

“Gaius of Cerdlow.”

Arthur's feet seem to take root where he stands; Gaius of Cerdlow, court physician to Camelot. Gaius sometimes spoke to him of his brother, who had long ago left Albion for the east; Arthur still remembers a lucid moment stolen out of winter sickness, drifting in and out of fever-dreams as Gaius leafed through a volume of his own crabbed notes beside the bed. His voice in Arthur's memory laments the loss of his brother's gift with letters and words, to the king's impatient ears.

“Impossible,” says Arthur, but there's weakness in his voice even he can hear. “Impossible.”

“Your father fears many things, Prince of Albion,” says Cadwaladr softly. “Perhaps he is not merely a senile old man. Perhaps he has a reason for such fear.”

Arthur turns to face him. “Why?” is all he can ask.

And at that, he sees a shadow fall across in the Wolf of Powys, as if a restless ghost makes its presence felt. Cadwaladr rises, and crosses to Arthur; Arthur tenses, still wild with shock and ready to fight; and yet it's not threat he perceives in the gesture. Something makes him fall still as Cadwaladr raises his hand, but it's not fear; something makes him submit – yes, submit – to the gentle brush of the Wolf's fingertips, where he should have stiffened, flinched away from the touch.

“Because you spoke the truth to me, and I rewarded it with violence,” says Cadwaladr. The bruise on Arthur's cheek throbs, awakened even by so gentle a touch; the swollen, scabbing split in his lip is a steady burn. “I have no heir.”

“So you choose to deprive Albion's heir of his father instead.”

Cadwaladr glances at Gwynn, who is watching both of them with sharp grey eyes. “The truth is what is is, Prince Arthur. It is stronger than any man. It was stronger than your father, and he has kept it from you for fear that you too are as weak as him.”

Arthur's political mind can see exactly how Cadwaladr stands to gain from this; and yet there's more to it. There's something in Cadwaladr's eyes as he glances at Gwynn; something veiled and wary. The wolf of Powys is afraid of this slim, quiet man.

“I will leave you for tonight,” says Cadwaladr. “Gwynn has many tales, should you wish to be entertained.”

As the great oak door swings closed behind the warlord – his back, always his back, Arthur thinks, as if he doesn't want to be seen – Gwynn shifts in his place, and asks quietly, “Will you be wanting the rest of the lay, is it, or shall I play something more quiet?”

“Finish it,” says Arthur, settling his chin in his hand and gazing into the fire. “And then tell me every other word you know of the matter.”

 

 

It's long past midnight when Arthur exhausts Gwynn's store of tidbits and scraps; an old lay to Queen Igraine's beauty, rumours, hearsay, nothing more.

“If Lord Cadwaladr is awake,” says Arthur, “would you ask him if I may speak with him?”

Gwynn stands, but he pauses before he does Arthur's bidding.

“There are tales I could tell you of the Wolf as well if you want them, _mael_ ,” he says.

Arthur looks up, and catches the warning in Gwynn's eyes. He sits back, and looks at the bard soberly; recalls the extraordinary touch Cadwaladr bestowed on him, and his own extraordinary reaction.

“All men hold surprises, Gwynn of Cornwall,” he says.

Gwynn's silent acknowledgement is all the confirmation he needs.

 

 

He expected to be hauled into Cadwaladr's chamber, for the warlord to merely tolerate his presence as he lounged among his furs; but Cadwaladr returns to the hall, dressed exactly as he was, having apparently not yet retired. He watches Arthur silently from a short distance, and Arthur returns his level regard.

“It seems the secrets of Camelot are many,” Arthur says.

“All kingdoms have their secrets, little prince.”

“And all men their flaws. I learnt many years ago that my father was a blinkered man.”

“And I that my kingdom would remain without an heir.”

The pause hangs heavy on the air between them; weighted, unmistakable.

“My question remains, son of the Pendragon. Will you submit to Powys' will?”

Arthur, lit by the fading firelight, crosses to Cadwaladr and faces him, from mere inches away.

“I cannot submit,” he says. _I am Albion's future. Her king_.

Cadwaladr's attack when it comes is sudden and fierce, his arm pinning Arthur's behind his back; Arthur does not struggle. He relaxes into the Wolf's steely grip, and meets his eyes.

“I cannot submit,” he says again, and the rich, dark shadings in his voice surprise him.

Cadwaladr bears him to the ground and strips him with ruthless efficiency; and never, never once, does he let his lips touch Arthur's.

 

 

Arthur wakes in the bed in the stolen chamber he slept in the day before; he aches still, his shoulders stiffening and his bruises raw, but to the minstrels' gallery of pain a new chord has been added, the subtle sting of abraded wrists and a deeper burn within. He rolls onto his back, looks up at the pale canopy that must have belonged to Cornwall's queen; pauses to appreciate the irony of that thought. The Wolf of Powys was a tender ravager; nothing in what he had done had been gentle, and yet nor had it been rough. He had been silent, save for a snarl of exertion or a hoarse gasp; and when it was done, Arthur had sat up, staring into the fire, allowing the Wolf to admire him for a while.

It could be an alliance; this uneasy bond, this... passion. All reports hold Cadwaladr a fine strategist; his campaign against the Saxons clearly marks him as a general to match Uther's skill. And between him and Arthur, between the motherless son and the sonless king, he felt some deeper current he had not yet understood. Could he, the young Pendragon, ride with the Wolf to victory? Could Albion be saved, the Saxons driven back?

And what of his father then? What of the mad Pendragon, the failing king? Would Cadwaladr keep his word?

Would Arthur? A wash of memory overtakes him; the Wolf's hands hard on his shoulders, his own fingers curling over a scar on Cadwaladr's arm. Desire flickers low in his belly.

Negotiation. Surely there is leeway. Surely not even the Wolf of Powys is hardened to the bone; a man who fears a bard's sharp eyes and tattling tongue must be within reach, somehow.

A distant commotion sounds in the hall; a clash of steel on steel. Arthur galvanises and leaps for his clothes, his aches no longer a memory but an obstacle. Voices roar “To me! To me!” and the ring of weapons comes clearer; Arthur casts about for a weapon, finds the room cleared of even a poker with which he might arm himself, and flattens himself warily behind the bedchamber door. The oak door of the outer chamber rattles on its hinges, solid as it was, as something hits it; there's a shout, and amid a chaos of running feet the scrape of a key in the lock.

“Camelot!” comes a cry, and feet rush into the room, chainmail rattling above their tread. And for a terrible moment, Arthur feels hesitation; feels the urge to hide, to follow this fledgling tug, the thread of wondrous chances yet to come. It is with a sober gaze that he steps out and says firmly, “Camelot is alive and well, boys, no need to panic on my account.”

 

 

The castle is in even greater disarray; bodies strew the hallways, candles lie exinguished amid starbursts of splattered wax.

“What the hell happened?” says Arthur.

“Reinforcements, sire,” says Sir Kay succinctly. “A party of deserters from your father's force.”

“Cadwaladr has an army!”

“Fighting shadows in a valley half a day away. We set twenty more campfires last night than we had tents. No time to lose, sire, they'll be finding it out any minute.”

“And the Wolf?”

“Dead, sire. First door we tried.”

“Damn you for a knave,” Arthur roars, fury flushing his face. “The man could have been an ally, and he treated me with honour.” An ally. Something more. Despair beats desperate wings inside his chest; he forces it down. His father's army deserting; his ally – the Wolf who ravaged his body and touched his heart – is dead.

“Now we've his head to show, there's an army that'll take orders from us instead, sire,” cuts in Ector.

“I'll have you flogged six strokes for every man who runs for Wales,” Arthur snarls, and snatches Ector's sword. “Bring me Gwynn of Cornwall alive, and the Wolf's body on a pyre outside the gate.”

The Wolf of Powys' army returns to find the dragon of Albion flying gold above Arthur's head, as the wind stirs and ruffles a white wolf on a cloth of emerald, until the shape underneath the banner could almost be a beast itself. Cadwaladr's second rides forward with Alun at his side.

“My men have made a very grave mistake,” says Arthur, as his charger shakes its head. “I gave no order for the lord of Powys to be killed. To all those men who wish it I offer safe passage to Wales, and to those who would join Albion against the Saxons, I offer war and the spoils of victory."

“There is an army of enemies at your feet, Pendragon,” says Alun, in that dry, precise way. “The balance of power is a delicate thing.”

“All men have their secrets, Steward,” says Arthur quietly. Alun's pale eyes meet his and slide sideways to Gwynn, hemmed in by Arthur's knights. A kind of cold accord passes between them.

“I have lost a great ally this day,” Arthur goes on, just as quietly. “Perhaps with the Wolf at Albion's side, we would have truly turned the tide.”

 

 

The banner that hangs in Camelot's hall in memory of Arthur's victory is as Arthur described it to his father's herald of arms; his father, returning to Camelot at last gaunt and yet more rigid still upon his horse, clapped him on the back when he saw it and called it a superb hymn to Albion's dominance. He seemed vastly pleased; he stood staring at it for some time, praising the sight of the Albion dragon itself blazoned across a ground of Powys's woe.

But Arthur sees something else, both in the hall of Camelot and in the restless dreams that come to him these nights, dreams where he holds a bloody knife in his hand. Arthur looks on the banner and sees the scarlet dragon raised up by hills of green, reaching toward a cloud-white Cornish sky. He oversaw the making of the banner; in the dragon's eye, looking down over the king of Albion that is and the king that will be, there is a speck of white as if light is striking it. Arthur knows, because he watched Guinevere embroider it himself, that it's a wolf. It lies curled as if in sleep, one eye slitted and watchful of the prince who moves below.

 

***

 

Deep below the castle, in a cavern like a dungeon where light barely penetrates, an imprisoned dragon stirs and speaks.

Merlin looks up from the stone basin; the still water in it clears and pales, the image of a dying hearth melting into that of a pyre. His eyes shimmer, and his sharp bones and the angry set of his face give him the look of a hungry beast.

“Bide your time, young warlock,” the dragon rumbles, its words heavy with fate. “This was not your destined day.”

Merlin steps back and slinks away into the shadows; a young wolf at bay.

 

 

 

**Author's Note:**

> I must be having a crap week again, I'm writing kink. Cadwaladr is a historic Welsh king who was a kind of pre-mythological Arthur, and did some pretty impressive things in terms of kicking the Saxons out but was ultimately beaten back; I'm messing with him for plot reasons. Casterley Camp is an iron age hill fort in Wiltshire, and yes yes hill forts most likely weren't really forts, but I like prehistoric things. Alun is a weasel and I have no idea where characters like him come from in my head, I really don't.


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